How Sports Teams Can Increase Revenue with Personalized Engagements

Your fans may have a love of the game in common, but in order to sell tickets, merchandise and concessions, you can’t treat them all the same. Season ticket members are a different breed than partial season ticket members and non-members are different still. The key to gaining the most revenue out of each segment of your fanbase is to deliver the best, most relevant engagement on the best, most relevant channel based on what the data tells you. In this blog post, we’re taking a look at some examples of how sports teams can drive ticket sales and revenue from in-stadium purchases.

Season ticket members

For season ticket members it’s all about the long game. In order to ensure that fans who were season ticket members in the previous season remain members in the next season, teams need to focus on increasing engagement throughout the season.

Your season ticket members are your VIP fans, many of whom have been members for several years or even decades. Sending personalized communications to them during the off-season is a great way to make them feel special. For example, send “Happy Birthday” messages and an offer for a free t-shirt or memorabilia item, depending on how long the person has been a member.

Besides the little extras, teams need to stay on top of important dates like the season ticket member purchase window, as well as appropriately timing offers for upgrades to ticket packages.

Partial season ticket members

Upgrading partial season ticket members to full season members is a great opportunity to increase revenue from a segment of fans that are already spending money.

For example: send partial season ticket members special pricing or discounts based on the availability of season tickets. Alternatively, try an experiential offer like granting access to full STM benefits for a game or series of games to give fans a taste of all the perks they would enjoy if they upgraded.

Broader fan-base

Every stadium wants to sell as many seats as possible, but inevitably sometimes you’ll have remnant inventory before game time. Leveraging fans’ location data to develop and send targeted offers for leftover tickets is a great way to increase the likelihood those offers will be redeemed.

For example: send an offer for discounted tickets to non season tickets members to all fans that live within a 40 mile radius of the stadium.

Besides targeting fans based on their proximity to the stadium, you can also target fans with offers for remnant inventory based on their attendance to games earlier in the season. For example: send an offer for discounted tickets to fans who have attended at least one game in the current season.

In-stadium merchandise and food and beverage purchases

In addition to ticket sales, a significant portion of stadium revenue comes from sales of merchandise from in-arena retail stores and food and beverage vendors. Stadiums need to send personalized offers in order to motivate fans to buy goods and concessions.

For example: send a push notification with an offer for a free soda with the purchase of a hot dog; or send fans who have specified their favorite player an offer to receive 20% off all merchandise related to that player. At half-time, send a reminder message to fans that have not redeemed the offer yet. You could also send offers for specific merchandise to fans within a certain distance from one of the stores in the arena.

Just as each player on your roster has stats that set him apart, each of your fans has a unique profile of data points about her preferences, behaviors, etc., that makes her different from any other fan in your database. In order to maximize revenue from season ticket members, partial members, and the broader fan-base, sports teams must focus on delivering personalized, data-backed engagements at the moment of impact.